May 28, 1953: Scaling Everest

Edmund Hillary (left) and Nepalese Sherpa Tenzing Norgay approach 28,000 feet (8,534 meters) on Mount Everest on May 28, 1953. The next day Hillary would become the first human to stand atop the world's highest mountain, with Tenzing joining him seconds later.

The New Zealand adventurer died January 11, 2008, in a hospital in his hometown of Auckland. He was 88. (Read full obituary.)

“I am a lucky man," he told an interviewer after the Everest climb. "I have had a dream and it has come true, and that is not a thing that happens often to men.”

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